WATERLOO — Charging drivers to pay for roads has come a long way from the days of the kiosks and toll booths found on many American highways.

The system used on Highway 407 allows the motorist to drive under a gantry and a bill will magically appear in the mail or their inbox indicating how much they owe for that day’s trip.

That technology is about to take another leap forward with a new service developed by Waterloo-based Intelligent Mechatronic Systems.

The service uses an in-car device, existing cellphone towers and analytic software created by the company to track where a vehicle drives and how much it travels on each road. The data can then be sent to government authorities for use in charging motorists to pay for highway construction and maintenance.

The current technology using gantries, cameras and transponders is quite costly to maintain and operate, and can’t be deployed over a wide area, he says.

“Our technology eliminates that infrastructure from the equation and allows a larger spectrum of users to share the cost.”

Intelligent Mechatronic gathers data on road usage in a device about the size of a small camera that can be plugged into a port installed under the dashboard in all cars sold in North America since 1996.

It’s a variation on the company’s DriveSync device, developed in 1996 to monitor driver behaviour, vehicle location, average speed, distance travelled and other diagnostics. The behavioural data is used primarily by insurance companies.

It’s all part of the company’s goal to create the “connected car,” he says.

Eventually, he sees the DriveSync platform doing away with hardware altogether and being embedded in the vehicle’s software system.

The company’s road-tolling device adds “layers of intelligence and improvement” to GPS and Bluetooth technology. It takes the data from the car and sends it via wireless networks to Intelligent Mechatronic’s cloud-based platform. There it is analyzed and a report is produced on road usage, he says.

Another advantage of the company’s platform is that it allows for variable pricing, so drivers can be charged less for using roads in off-peak times, Basir notes.

Intelligent Mechatronic is one of three companies participating in a pilot project by the state of Oregon to test new road-charging systems. Two other American states have shown strong interest, as have London, England, and a government in the Far East, he says.

Two challenges facing the company are distribution and compliance, Basir says. The road-charging technology won’t work unless it’s installed in all vehicles.

Governments will likely be the channel for distribution and the devices could be installed when a driver renews his or her licence, he says. The hardware could also be made available in electronics stores.

“We think we have a good plan,” Basir says.

An earlier generation of the device has already been installed in “a good number” of vehicles to enable usage-based insurance, Basir says.

Another challenge is the political one, says Blair Currie, the company’s vice-president of marketing. Installing road-charging systems in cars carries a cost and potentially more fees for the driver. “It is an issue for government,” he says. “We’re already fairly heavily taxed in the western world.”

On the plus side, Intelligent Mechatronic’s platform mitigates the cost because it is virtually “infrastructure-less,” Currie says.

Megacities in Europe and the Far East are crying out for this kind of technology, he says, noting that large cities can use it to finance infrastructure in heavily congested areas.

Oregon has shown interest because it is a “green state” with a higher percentage of electric and hybrid vehicles, making it harder to pay for roads using fuel taxes, says Basir.

Intelligent Mechatronic was founded in 1999 by Basir, a Libyan immigrant and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. It has 110 employees and offices in Waterloo, Chicago and the United Kingdom.

Most of its employees work out of its head office on King Street, north of Weber Street.

Basir still spends “a good chunk” of his time at UW, but says he has a good team running the day-to-day operations at Intelligent Mechatronic. “IMS is almost like a commercialization lab for the University of Waterloo,” he says.

He was moved to launch the company and focus on road safety technology, he says, after his wife was involved in a minor car accident that wasn’t her fault. The firm’s first product was a smart airbag, which it eventually licensed to a tier-one supplier.

The smart airbag was an example of “reactive safety,” says Basir. Intelligent Mechatronic has moved away from that to focus on “preventive safety,” he says.

One of its other products is iLane, a technology that enables drivers to access email, calendar and contacts from their smartphones using voice commands.

The company is working on the next generation of iLane, which should hit the market early next year, Basir says. It will eliminate the hardware component and feature software that can be downloaded to a car or smartphone, he says.

Another product available through the DriveSync platform is sold through insurance companies and measures the driving behaviour of teenagers. The program is popular with parents, says Basir.